“The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze
it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.” – Brett Weston

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‘abstraction’
brett weston
photograph
1978
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‘mud cracks’
brett weston
photograph
1977
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‘mud cracks’
brett weston
photograph
1968
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‘abrasions’
brett weston
photograph
1977
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‘junked car’
brett weston
photograph
1977
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‘cracked glass’
brett weston
photograph
1955
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‘abrasions’
brett weston
photograph
1977
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The two portfolios titled Abstractions, first issued in 1980, offered Brett Weston a general concept within which to collect and publish forty of the best pictures from his entire career. At age sixty-nine he may have thought of these portfolios as a kind of retrospective, even though he was by no means finished taking pictures and always said that the photograph he most cared about was the next one.

He certainly did not care about art theory, but acknowledged a debt to modern painting, and seems to have been comfortable with the term “abstraction.” He must have understood that his photographic style stood in some relationship to Modernism and the 20th century tradition of abstract art. Nevertheless, the word “abstraction” seems to be used pretty loosely here, because there are several pictures in these volumes that might more accurately be called traditional deep-space landscapes.